When a cloud of myopic myths envelop an issue like a purple
haze, such that the conventional wisdom seems somehow
contrived, carefully crafted, and conspicuously crapulous to
the sober-minded, the conspiratorialy minded are apt to
wonder if perhaps some sort of organized mind manipulation
is at play. That said, in retrospect, the prevelant fantasies about the
Internet as the last frontier of freedom seem suspiciously
sanquine.
Consider, for example, the
widespread misconception that the Internet, which was
designed by DARPA, a super spy agency, and is still
controled by DARPA, a super spy aqency, was designed with
our personal privacy and anonymity as part of its
irrevocable architecture. Let's consider that idea.

John Markoff, the NYT
technology writer, in an article about Sealand, an offshore
server farm, entitled "Computer Rebels Plan
Data Haven", July 8, 2000,
quoted a computer guru who said that in the not
too distant future, due to Internet and related technologies
"it will be impossible to trace where money is and who has
money and that will eventually force governments to move
away from the income tax." Oh, goody! So much for death and
taxes, or at least the income tax part. Trouble is, although
this article
and others like it might give us the impression
that Sealand's server farm might concievably escape the Eye
of Big Brother, or at least the All-Reaching Arm of the IRS,
there was, as it turned out, no good reason to think so.
True, Sealand was over 10 miles offshore from the U.K., and
so, theoretically, it wasn't subject to English jurisdiction
or law, but there are so many ways to reach out and
crush someone, especially if that person happens to be
connected to the Internet. But how, short of declaring war
on Sealand, could Merry Old England keep Sealand under its
thumb?

1) Go after their telephone service provider;
2) go after their credit-card service provider, e.g., Paypal;
they can't do on-line business using cash, so without any
credit-card processing service, they're stuck in the mud.
3) go after their ISP, e.g., AOL, or whoever provided them
with internet service; customers can't drive to your shop and
buy product if you're an on-line business only, so without
the information highway's on-ramps, you're off the ranch.
4) go after the search engine portal, e.g., Yahoo or Google;
doesn't do much good to have an internet-based business with
no on-line exposure, no way for customers to find out that
your out there, no billboard on the info highway; 5) go after the domain-name provider;
any web site needs a domain name; no domain name, no website
and no business.
In other words, the Internet doesn't eliminate intermediaries
but changes who they are: ISPs, search engines, browsers,
physical networks, financial intermediaries, communication
protocols, domain name providers, etc. To truly act without
intermediaries means one must either act alone, else in a
community that can act alone--the closest thing to that would
not be an internet community of any kind, because any such
community depends upon all of the aforementioned contingencies,
but rather, say, an Amish community that can, to a large degree,
manufacture what it needs without relying on the system. Even
the very life blood of the internet, information, cannot be
accessed without intermediaries that were previously
unecessary; an on-line e-book requires a computer, electric
power, and software to simply read a book, not to mention
the infrastructure that may be necessary to download the
book. This makes the individual more dependent, not less
so, upon intermediaries, incl. the power grid, so far from
making people more autonomous, the Internet makes them less
so. So much for Markoff's hype about computer rebels working
outside the system, so let's consider now the idea that
the internet user is, if not independent or autonomous, at
least anonymous.

In 1989, as recored in his book "The Cuckoo's Egg", Clifford
Stoll, an astronomer at Lawrence Berkley Lab, managed to
trace the location of a computer hacker located in Hannover
Germany who had been breaking into computer systems in the
United States. Despite the hacker's method of using mediate
computers to cover his tracks, Stoll managed to trace the
hacker's location at the University of Bremen. This would
seem to suggest that any locational anonymity that's said to
exist on the Internet is suspect, perhaps a temporary thing,
and in any case, fail safe it evidently ain't--a fact Mr.
Markoff might be thought to know, given that he helped track
down the supposed uber-hacker Kevin Mitnick, not without the
help of some friends in the intel community, after he'd made
Mitnick into a front-page story.
As it turned out, Mitnick wasn't much of a threat, not hard
to find, not at all the imposing threat he'd been made out
to be, and his location was triangulated without much ado or
difficulty using cell phone technology that's now applicable
to most of the wireless internet world. As these facts seem
to suggest, the myth seems not to match the man, yet how many
were ensared by the myth? Mitnick was tracked like a bug
on a rug and blown up on the press like a hot-air baloon.

In the late 1990s, Marc Knobel, a French Jew, found Nazi
hate sites on AOL and threatened a public relations war
unless the offending sites were blocked. AOL closed the
sites. As everybody should know by now, AOL is not your
typical ISP. Located in Washington D.C. suburbia, AOL has
it's finger on political realities that Silicon Valley
Internet companies like Yahoo might much like to ignore,
and evidently, judging by the ubiquity of AOL's distribution
software CDs, which are pushed at FedEx Kinkos, CompUSA, and
seemingly inumerable other retailers, not to mention the
U.S. Post Office, a federal agency of all places--AOL is
well-connected and well-liked by the powers that supposedly
see all and be all. In any case, AOL eargerly complied with
Knobel's complaint.

In 2000, Knobel hoped that a similar threat against Yahoo
would yeild like results. His hopes were dashed, however.
Yahoo, the brain child of two Stanford graduate students,
Jerry Yan and David Filo, evidently adopted the politically
incorrect view that only an un-American Net Nazi would seek
to stiffle free speach on the Internet by appealing to
restrictive French hate-crime laws. In any case, Yahoo did
nothing to remmove the offensive content, perhaps giving
Knobel and company the sense that they were being told to
take a long hike on a short peer. It's hard to know how
Knobel's Gestapo-Stopers might view Yahoo's unwillingness to
jump at the opportunity to remmove offensive speach from
cyberspace.

In any case, Knobel was not disuaded or detered. On April
11, 2000, he sued Yahooo in a French court on behalf of the
International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and
others, who claimed in court that Yahoo's actions violated
the French laws banning the import or trafficing of Nazi
regalia in France. In a surprise ruling on May 22, 2000, the
French court ruled that Yahoo was indeed obligated to
prevent French web surfers from accessing the
France-Forbidden Yahoo-based Nazi auctions sites on
yahoo.com. Yahoo claimed such filtering was not feasible, a
technological impossibility: "Asking us to filter access to
our sites according to the nationality of surfers is very
naive." Evidently, even genius is not immune to propaganda.

Yahoo's impossiblity argument was based on prevalant but
erroneous assumptions about the architecture of the
internet, not the least of which is that the Net's
architecture was written in stone, a theory since disproved
by, among other things, China's Golden Shield system. Uncle
Sam it was, not God, who ordained that there be 13 root
servers under the control of the U.S. government, and after
the 9-1l terror attack, some of Uncle Sam's employees in
the FBI were the first to suggest the unthinkable: namely,
that the Internet architecture be changed fundamentally,
thus suggesting that perhaps Uncle Sam knew what "We the
People" were programmed to know not.

It had been commonly thought, based on the writings of
various mass media Internet hypesters, some of whom are
arguably NSA assets or British Intelligence, that "the net
interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", and
also, that the location of the interent users could not be
identified. After all, the Net was not built with physical
geography in mind. Neither Internet Protocol Addresses (each
computer's numeric ID), nor Interent domain names, nor email
addresses, were designed to dependably indicate the
georaphical location of the computers on the Internet. As
the world was recently told in Friedman's book, "The World
is Flat", a book evidently not written for flatheads, the
Internet was destined to render borders virtually nugatory
and thus open closed societies. Yet these predictions never
materialized and seem somewhat groundless given the fact
that the Internet is controlled by 13 root servers, that
these root servers are controlled by the U.S. government,
and what's more, that a simple DoS (Denial of Service) hack
attack against these servers has been known to nearly shut
the Internet down for a time. No doubt, if hackers can do
it, Uncle Sam's hackers can do it also.

To use the words of Bill Clinton's Internet Czar, Ira
Magaziner: "The United States paid for the Internet, the Net
was created under its auspices, and most importantly
everything Jon [Postel] and Network Solutions [independent
contractors] did were pursuant to governement contracts."
Simply stated, the U.S government, nobody else, possessed
ultimate authority over the Internet, and they had no
scruples about asserting that authority if necessary.

Judge Gomez gave Yahoo two months to find out how to block
French surfers, during which time Cryil Houri, another
French Jew, the founder of a new American firm called
InfoSplit, contacted the plaintiff's lawyer, Stephane Lilti,
and told him that he had created an allegedly new technology
that could identify and screen Internet content on the basis
of its geographical source. It's reported that Houri, a
pioneer in Internet geo-location technology, concluded in
1999 that the conventional wisdom about the Internet and
territory was erroneous. But the idea of locating internet
surfers in real space was not new. Since the early 1990s,
Internet firms tried to discover the geographical identity
of their customers.

Although Internet IP addresses do not direcly divulge the
user's physical location, the information packets that make
up Internet communications travel via computers whose
location in real space is easy to identify. A "tracing"
packet can repeort the list of computers through which a
communication travels, thus permiting computers to determine
the path that the packet traveled and identifying the
closest source node, the computer closest to the computer
from which the packet originated--usually servers of certain
organizations, such as universities, quite often commercial
ISPs. When cross checked against other IP databases that
offer different data about the geographical locations and
analyzed by sophisiticated computer algorithms, the location
of Internet users can be determined with over 99 percent
accuracy at the country level, but with less accuracy at the
state and county level. A web operator can use this system
to automatically identify the location of computer users
seeking access to a web page and can display content that's
customized according to the location of the web surfer. The
process is invisible to the internet visitor.

Further, with AAA (adaptive antenna array) technology, which
greatly increases the bandwith of wireless communications
systems, wireless internet activity will doubtless increase,
thus making it possible to identify the exact location of an
internet user in real time using the same triagulation
techniques used to pinpoint cell phone users. Wi-Fi will
make it easier to track people geographically through radio
signals and satellites while making Internet activity on
portable devices, such as web-enabled phones or wear-cams,
much more pervasive, thus allowing easier geographical
tracking of more web users through the Global Positioning
Systems (GPS) that are built into such devices, in which
case all the hype about the anonimity of Internet access
and the untrackability of web surfers (via their computers)
in real space in real time seems a red herring.